Science & TechnologyS


Info

Genetic Mutation Linked To Walking On All Fours

What are the genes implicated in upright walking of humans? The discovery of four families in which some members only walk on all fours (quadrupedality) may help us understand how humans, unlike other primates, are able to walk for long periods on only two legs, a scientist will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics on June 2.

crawling baby
©iStockphoto/Eugeny Shevchenko
While normal infants make the transition to walking on two legs in a relatively short period, some members of a recently discovered group of families continued to move on their palms and feet and never walked upright.

Magnify

Good News In Our DNA: Defects You Can Fix With Vitamins And Minerals

As the cost of sequencing a single human genome drops rapidly, with one company predicting a price of $100 per person in five years, soon the only reason not to look at your "personal genome" will be fear of what bad news lies in your genes.

DNA
©UC Berkeley
Electron microscope image of budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. UC Berkeley researchers insert variants of human enzymes into yeast to see if these enzymes can be tuned up with vitamins.

Telescope

Spitzer Captures Stellar Coming Of Age In Our Galaxy

More than 800,000 snapshots from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have been stitched together to create a new "coming of age" portrait of stars in our inner Milky Way galaxy.

Image
©NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisconsin
More than 800,000 frames from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope were stitched together to create this infrared portrait of dust and stars radiating in the inner Milky Way.

Telescope

Two Of The Milky Way's Spiral Arms Go Missing

For decades, astronomers have been blind to what our galaxy, the Milky Way, really looks like. After all, we sit in the midst of it and can't step outside for a bird's eye view.

Milky Way
©NASA/JPL-Caltech
Using infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have discovered that the Milky Way's elegant spiral structure is dominated by just two arms wrapping off the ends of a central bar of stars. Previously, our galaxy was thought to possess four major arms.

Gear

Nanotechnology builds artificial virus

For years, scientists have been trying to create artificial viruses that are as proficient as natural ones in delivering materials to cells. Successful, artificial viruses could carry therapeutic agents into human cells to treat a variety of diseases. Unfortunately, synthesizing an artificial virus with the ideal shape and size for maximum delivery efficiency is extremely difficult. A common method for their generation involves polyion coupling, which often leads to aggregates with uncontrollable dimensions.

Star

"Light echo" helps solve Cassiopeia A supernova mystery



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©NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/ Science
A false-color image shows the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. The picture combines infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (red), visible data from the Hubble Space Telescope (yellow), and x-ray data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (green and blue).

Astronomers have used an interstellar "mirror" to solve the longstanding mystery over what kind of supernova created Cassiopeia A, one of the brightest radio objects in the sky.

Cass A, as the object is often called, is the expanding remains of a stellar explosion about 9,000 light-years away that is believed to have occurred around A.D. 1680. Until now no one has been able to pinpoint the exact nature of the blast.

Video

Iraq's Ancient Tablets to Get New, Virtual Life



Image
©Paola Negri/Sergio Petronilli/ENEA
The cuneiform tablets housed in Iraq document how people lived for millennia in ancient Mesopotamia. They describe codes of law, treatises and economic transactions, from the beginning of writing, around 3350 B.C., until the end of the pre-Christian era.

A technology normally used in reconstructive surgery to create prosthetic limbs is now being applied to create reproductions of Iraq's precious and fragile cuneiform clay tablets, according to an Italian team of researchers.

Thousands and thousands of artifacts were stolen and broken at Bagdad's museums following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in what has been called the most catastrophic theft of antiquities since World War II.

Telescope

New Mini-Planet Is Lightweight Champ



Image
©Space.comn

There's a new extrasolar planet on the block: a mini-orb likely covered with a deep ocean. And it takes the record for the lowest mass exoplanet to orbit a normal star, astrophysicists announced today.

The li'l planet - weighing in at three times Earth's mass ­ - grabs the lightweight title from a five Earth-mass planet just announced in April.

Butterfly

Feathers make the man in world of birds: study

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Dying the red breast feathers of barn swallows not only won the birds more mates -- it made their testosterone levels shoot up, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

The dye itself did not change biology -- but it did change the way other birds reacted to the enhanced males, said Rebecca Safran of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who led the study.

Phoenix

Scientists heat matter to hotter than surface of the Sun



vacuum spatial filter
©Unknown
Cleaning a vacuum spatial filter for the Vulcan Petawatt Facility during its construction

A laser in Oxfordshire has heated matter to 10 million Celsius, hotter than the surface of the Sun, marking a major landmark in research.

The milestone in the field of high energy density physics has been reached by an international team from Japan, the EU and the US working at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.